For Borrego Springs — the tiny town surrounded by the park — the super bloom has created a bit of pandemonium.

JoAnn Maiter, a part-time employee of the Borrego Springs Chamber of Commerce, said she couldn’t remember how many phone calls she’d answered. Dozens and dozens.

“We’re swamped. You can’t even get into our visitor’s center right now,” she said, adding that nearly 300 people had already signed into the visitor’s log by noon on Friday. “They’re coming from everywhere — absolutely everywhere: Canada, Minnesota, Chicago.”

Marisa Gerber writes narrative stories about life in Los Angeles and across the Southland for the Los Angeles Times. She previously covered L.A. County’s criminal courts for The Times and, before joining the newspaper in 2012, wrote about life on the border for several publications in Arizona. Gerber grew up in Nogales, Ariz., and graduated from the University of Arizona.

Lawmakers passed a bill targeting pornographic “deep fakes.” The technology has been used to digitally graft the face of a person into a pornographic film without the people involved knowing or consenting to it.